Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/547

Rh hospital, which, in point of incredible foulness and stench, is not paralleled by any similar institution, even in the most northerly and most remote towns of Siberia. The water-closet, evidently, is never cleaned, and liquids from it have run into the unwarmed corridor through which patients have to come to the closet, and have there frozen into a stratum of foul ice. Most of the sick lie on the floors, for want of cots, and lie so closely together that there is barely room to enter the kámeras. They all complained — and those lying on the floor complained with tears and lamentation — of the terrible cold in the kámeras, from which they were freezing without any means of covering themselves or getting warm. The temperature was really such as to necessitate a fur coat and cap. In one small separate cell lay two syphilitic patients — a man and a woman together, as there was no ward for women suffering from that disease — and on a pile of rags under a table in one corner of that same cell lay, cowering and getting behind each other, like puppies or kittens, two little children under three years of age belonging to the woman. The isprávnik explained that he had tried to make some other disposition of the children, in order to save them from infection; but that none of the inhabitants of the town would take them.

Exile parties, upon their arrival in Kírinsk, stop in this prison and are put into the corridor, since there is no forwarding prison here, and all the cells are already full of prisoners awaiting trial or undergoing punishment. When I visited the prison on the 17th of February, it contained an exile party numbering 120 which had just arrived from Irkútsk. Among these exiles were seven dangerously sick with typhus, and three more or less frozen. As there was no room for them in the hospital, they were laid on the floor of the corridor, and on the benches or shelves of a little store-room. On the march from Irkútsk, one exile had frozen to death. According to the statement of the warden, about one-tenth of all the exiles that come from Irkútsk arrive in Kírinsk without proper winter clothing, having sold their khaláts and shúbas, either for intoxicating liquor or for food. Some justify themselves for so doing by saying that they receive only fourteen kopéks a day for their subsistence, that black rye bread sometimes costs there nine or ten kopéks a pound, and that they are forced to sell their outer garments in order to get enough to eat.

— "The Prisons of the Lena Region," by Vladimir Ptítsin. In magazine Séiverni Véstnik, St. Petersburg, December, 1889.

THE KRASNOYÁRSK PRISON.

Every year, at the time of the autumnal ice-run in the Yeniséi River, the forwarding prison and the ostróg become overcrowded with prisoners. Last fall they contained 2000 persons, although intended for only 600. One can imagine what takes place in prisons thus overcrowded — the